Instagram recently made the transition from guerilla marketing tool to full blown online business platform official with their latest update: business accounts! Now, companies can choose the option to switch their profiles from personal to business, which brings along a host of new features to utilize in order to help grow and track companies’ online presence.
If you’ve already changed your account over to a business profile (if you haven’t and want to know how to do it click here) you’ll have noticed you can now access analytics for your account. This is one of the most important features business accounts have to offer. Why? Well, being able to track your engagement is the first step in understanding your audience, and thus, knowing how to properly tailor your content to garner the most activity on your page. The good thing is that there are a lot of different analytics available to view. As long as you know what they all mean. Let’s break them down.
Activity
The first tab you’ll see under your Insights is Activity. This is practically a summary page for how much action your page is seeing on a weekly basis. You’ll also see that it is split into two categories: Interactions and Discovery.
Interactions highlight how many users have clicked on your posts or profile during the course of that calendar week. If you have an email and/or website attached to your account (business accounts give you options to add it as a button on your profile) that number will be further broken down to disclose the exact number of users that have interacted with those links.
Discovery breaks down the number of individual accounts that have interacted with your specific profile during that week too. It will highlight the reach of your posts, which is the amount of accounts that have seen any of your posts and the impressions, which is the total amount all of your posts have been seen. You will also be able to see the difference in your reach and impressions from the week before to see how you’re improving.
Content
The next set of insights focus on the numbers drawn from the content you’ve shared over the past 7 days (this includes both static posts and stories). While more in depth numbers are available when you view the insights on an individual post or story, this tab provides you with a quick look into how many times each post was seen so you can see how your content has been doing in a flash.
This is also where you would be able to see your insights for any paid promotions. Instagram now gives you the option to promote your posts to a wider audience for a small fee, which is useful for launches of new products, events, or anything else that you may want to reach a greater number of people.
Audience
The final tab in your insights is Audience. This is where you can see the exact demographics of your followers, which is a great tool to use to better understand who exactly is seeing and interacting with your content.
There are four subcategories that break down your Audience insights: Locations, Age Range, Gender, and Followers. They highlight the most common places your followers are from, how old they are, the majority gender, and the times of day they respond to your photos the most. It’s a great way to really connect with your followers and show you know a lot about them.
Analytics can be a business owner’s best friend. Now that you have them decoded, make sure to pay attention to the needs of your followers and adjust accordingly. It’s the magic wand you need to fall into rhythm with Instagram so you can share your big ideas with the world. Time to get down to business baby.
